THE
Sundarayya Vignana Kendram (SVK) was established in 1988 in memory of
P. Sundarayya, the Communist stalwart and popular hero of the
Telengana peasant uprising in the 1940s. It is managed by a registered
non-profit trust. Although the Andhra Pradesh government donated the
land for housing the Kendram, the entire construction cost of Rs.1
crore was met from public donations. A public research facility, the
SVK, seeks to promote studies on the socio-economic and cultural
aspects of Indian society, and scientific theories of socialism,
democracy and other schools of thought. In keeping with the popular
image of Sundarayya, the SVK also promotes studies on popular
movements, political parties and organisations. On an average, about
400 people visit the library's reading room every day, and about 300
scholars and teachers have joined the Kendram as members.

The
Research Library has a collection of rare books, journals, newspapers,
reports, pamphlets, manuscripts, private papers and other material in
various languages. It has a particularly rich collection of resource
material in Telugu and English on the socio-cultural, economic and
political histories of and popular social movements in central India
between the 12th and 20th centuries.

The
inspiration to initiate a Telugu collection came from Sundarayya's
personal collection of more than 10,000 books, in addition to his
private papers running to more than one lakh pages, considered to be
invaluable historical material. Sundarayya had collected publications
from the 19th and 20th centuries on a range of subjects. This provided
the basis for the establishment of the Research Library.

The
library also has the personal collections of Arudra, a progressive
Telugu writer and intellectual, and Dasarathi, another writer. The
collections of these two literary figures are rich in the Prabandha
kayas, literary criticism and writings on the Bhakthi movement in the
Deccan, in particular the creative writings of the followers of
Veerasaiva and Vaishnava religious reform movements from the 13th
century. The library also has a rich collection of Dalit literature in
Telugu. It is said that the library has almost all the Telugu
publications of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The
Urdu collections have a moving story behind them. Abdus Samad Khan, a
car mechanic and a lover of books, despite his meagre resources, had
collected a significant number of books in Urdu. In an interview to
the BBC in 1975, Samad Khan said that for six days a week he would be
at his garage but on the seventh day he would travel around the city
collecting books and magazines. Between 1963 and 1975, he had
collected 7,000 books, 32,000 magazines, 500 manuscripts, 200
travelogues, 200 to 250 texts of Urdu prose, 50 dictionaries and
numerous pamphlets. Among the collections were 125 special issues of
magazines on Ghalib and almost an equal number on the poet Iqbal.
Samad Khan started collecting books as a schoolboy in Delhi, and later
turned his collection into the URC. He indicated to the BBC that
already fatigue had set in. After a period of closure, the URC started
functioning again in 1987.

In
1996, James Nye was involved in the negotiations to purchase Samad
Khan's collection on behalf of the Urdu Research Library Consortium
(URLC). (Earlier Nye was involved in the execution of the project to
preserve the Tamil collections at the Roja Muthiah Research Library in
Chennai.) Samad Khan was paid $50,000 by the URLC for the URC
collection. In mid-1996, the URC shifted to the SVK.

Samad
Khan's collections include 26,500 monographs, works on historical
subjects ranging from the Qutb Shahi dynasty and the rule of the
Nizams (including government gazettes, court records and histories of
official service) to the condition and social customs of Muslims in
India and Partition. There are about 2,000 titles in this section at
the Centre. The URC has about 12,000 titles detailing the development
of the Urdu language - the tazkiras (Urdu prose), grammar and
phonetics and more than 2,500 volumes on poetry. It also includes
4,000 titles on religious subjects (among them are Urdu tracts on
Hinduism, Jainism and Christianity) and 2,000 biographies and
autobiographies.

The
URC's collection of periodicals, mostly from the 19th and early 20th
centuries, is considered to be the finest in South Asia. More than
60,000 journals and newspapers, including Sahifah, the first newspaper
published from Hyderabad in Urdu and Persian, are found in this
section.

The
SVK is a partner in the Digital South Asia Library project, a global
collaborative effort aimed at providing wider international access to
rare historical resources. The SVK is only one of three Indian
institutions involved in this international venture which includes
some of the best universities in the world.